Martin Stephen: The Conscience of the King

It was a desert outside of The Globe ten minutes after All Is True had started. The hawkers had gone their way and only a few hopefuls guarding horses stood outside the whitewashed walls. He slipped in through the back gate, the attendant forewarned and granting him a brief nod. The stairs challenged him. How to climb such stairs when feet did not feel the bite of wood on flesh? The ferocious determination of his anger took him over. Ludicrously, stupidly, he raised each foot high and plotted with his eyes its course as it landed on firm surface.

He was in the Lord's Gallery. The bulge of the thatch was restrained by canvas strung underneath it. He put his own manuscript down, his Fall of Lucifer, took out the knife, slashed at the canvas. It hung, sliced, then spewed out two, three rolled papers, each tied with an innocuous ribbon. It was a truly Caesarian birth, except there was no blood on the papers.

On the main stage, Prologue came on, gloriously overdressed, to wolf-whistles from the Pit. There was a curtain drawn across the facade of the Lord's Gallery, blunting and dimming the words spoken beneath.

'I come no more to make you laugh…' Prologue pronounced.

'More's the pity!' came the cry from a wag in the Pit, and the audience roared.

… things now

That bear a mighty and a serious brow, Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe, Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow, We now present…

More and more manuscripts came tumbling from the thatch where they had been hidden. Marlowe crouched on the floor, fumbling, opening, reading.

They were due a great moment on stage. The cue came. The boy playing Anne Boleyn said pipingly, 'You cannot show me…' and Lord Sandys replied, ' I told your grace they would talk anon…' On cue, the trumpets sounded, the drums rolled and there were two cracks of thunder from above, shaking the building. Two brass cannon had been placed in the turret, loaded with blank shot, making a terrifying noise.

'Christ Almighty!' said the armourer in charge of the cannon. He had loaded the weak charge of powder that morning, in preparation, and had then gone off for his beer and cheese in the tavern. He knew from the sound of the discharge that something was wrong. Somehow the cannon had been double-shotted. From the mouth of both cannons flew a flaming wadge of powder, still half-burned, followed by two or three sheets of burning wadding that the armourer knew he had never placed in the barrels. It all landed on the thatch on either side of the roof, smouldering. The armourer turned for the buckets of water and sand they kept up there if ever a chamber was to be fired. Damn and blast! They were gone. Where the hell were they?

The thatch took light almost immediately. In the first moments there was more heat than smoke, the only sign of the fire the shimmering heat haze immediately above it. Then, when the fire penetrated the surface layer to the slightly less sun-drained straw, there was a tell-tale, deceptively gentle wisp of smoke.

The audience ignored it, their attention drawn by the noise of powder, drums and trumpets, oblivious to the fact that a fire had been set in the roof that already no man could put out. Or rather, two separate fires, one on either side of the stage, racing through the thatch to meet in the area above the Lord's Gallery.

A part of Marlowe's mind heard the growing panic as both word and sight of the fire spread among the crowd. Yet it was not that which stopped his hungry examination of the manuscripts he had torn from the roof. It was a noise. There was someone here in the room with him. Hemminge? Condell? He turned with an ingratiating smile on his face. It froze where it lay.

'Good afternoon,' said Henry Gresham casually. 'We've met before, haven't we? And, of course, you know my wife.'

Henry Condell pushed a disconsolate toe into a small pile of the still-smouldering ashes that were all that was left of The Globe. His Globe. They had hoped that 29th June would go down in history: the day that Christopher Marlowe returned from the grave. Well, his wish had been granted. It would go down in history, that was for sure: the day that The Globe burned down. God knew where Marlowe had got to. No one had seen him enter the theatre. Well, he could whistle for Will's precious manuscripts. They had gone up in smoke together with the theatre. Will would be relieved, at least. Marlowe would want his money back, of course, that ludicrous amount of money, and his bloody play performed.

Condell felt a slight lightening of his spirit. They could still fulfil that part of the bargain, couldn't they? They still had Blackfriars. All right, it was smaller, indoors, but it was a theatre, wasn't it? And they were still the best company of actors in the country, weren't they? All they needed was the script. Marlowe — and he was half beginning to doubt he had been who he said he was — had been due to bring it yesterday. Still, if he'd lived twenty years after his death, a couple of days probably didn't mean too much to him. When he turned up with the manuscript, they'd do a deal. He could have his comeback at Blackfriars, couldn't he?

Condell's eye caught a lump, something blackish, sticking out of the ashes. His nose curled as he advanced and caught an overripe stench. There must have been birds nesting in the thatch to produce that smell of burned flesh. Thank God no one had died in the fire, only birds. It had caught in the roof and the Lord's Gallery had gone first, but the actors had known to evacuate and Marlowe's gold had paid for the gallery to be empty. One man's clothes had caught fire as he ran from the theatre, but another customer had had the wit to put the fire out with bottled ale.

Condell took the stick he had with him and poked at the lump. Half of it had melted with the fierce heat of the fire but the rest was clear enough. An iron neck collar, with a section of chain leading off it. Where on earth had they used that as a prop? Tamburlaine, with all its prisoners? Strange he couldn't remember. It must have dropped from the turret or from the Lord's Gallery. A pity The Globe hadn't been built of iron, he thought. If it had, more of it might have survived.

Well, he consoled himself, at least it was an accident. No one, not even Marlowe and certainly not Will Shakespeare, was mad enough to burn down The Globe to make a point.

The Cambridge University Library Cambridge, England 12th August, 2013

They closed the library at 7.00 p.m. in the long summer vacation. It was irritating because he could only come in August, and the extra two or three hours it remained open in term time would have been a godsend. His old college helped with accommodation, of course, But it could do little about food. It was still an expensive luxury, his three weeks intensive research in Cambridge, taken at the expense of his new young wife and even newer children.

The library still had half an hour to go before its official closing time, but the thought police started the campaign to get rid of readers long before that. The litany of announcements stating that books could no longer be borrowed seemed to start at 5.30 p.m. and rise to a positive crescendo by 6.00 p.m. After 6.30, all the library staff, usually so helpful, seemed to start coughing in unison while making busier and busier packing-up noises.

All in all, a strong feeling that his presence was no longer welcome. One box to go of the eight boxes he had ordered that morning of papers pertaining to the life and works of Lancelot Andrewes, sometime Bishop of Ely and Winchester. He wondered if he would ever get this thesis written, with the demands of a parish that seemed to occupy most of Lancashire now being matched by the demands of two young children, and the crucifying worries about money. He was skimping the material, glossing over papers that in the first flush of academic youth he would have pored over for a whole morning.